Exploring the Use of Pseudosymmetry in the Design of Higher-Symmetry Crystals of Racemic Compounds.

Organometallic antimony(V) complexes were prepared as model compounds to better understand the interactions of chiral chelating diols with this metalloid. These complexes feature three aryl groups (-xylyl or -tolyl) and a bidentate -2,3-butanediolate. The -xylyl and -tolyl complexes of either enantiomerically pure 2,3-butanediolate or 2,3-butanediolate (compounds -) crystallized in Sohncke space groups, as expected.

Hypoxia reconstructed colorectal tumor microenvironment weakening anti-tumor immunity: construction of a new prognosis predicting model through transcriptome analysis.

Background: Hypoxia in the tumor microenvironment (TME) plays a pivotal role in the progression and prognosis of colorectal cancer (CRC). However, effective methods for assessing TME hypoxia remain lacking. This study aims to develop a novel hypoxia-related prognostic score (HPS) based on hypoxia-associated genes to improve CRC prognostication and inform treatment strategies.

Understanding responses to multi-electrode epiretinal stimulation using a biophysical model.

Objective: Neural interfaces are designed to evoke specific patterns of electrical activity in populations of neurons by stimulating with many electrodes. However, currents passed simultaneously through multiple electrodes often combine nonlinearly to drive neural responses, making evoked responses difficult to predict and control. This response nonlinearity could arise from the interaction of many excitable sites in each cell, any of which can produce a spike.

SEASONAL VARIATION OF BLOOD ANALYTES ASSOCIATED WITH SKIN HEALTH IN ALASKAN ICE SEALS.

Recent unusual mortality events involving skin pathology in bearded (), ringed (), and spotted seals () in Alaska highlight the potential sensitivity of ice-associated species to the complex effects of climate change. The regulation of thyroid hormones, cortisol, and vitamin A have been shown to play essential roles in skin health and seasonal molt in some pinnipeds. Unfortunately, the lack of available reference data for healthy Alaskan ice seals has prevented the adequate evaluation of these factors in cases associated with mortality events.

A benchmark for computational analysis of animal behavior, using animal-borne tags.

Background: Animal-borne sensors ('bio-loggers') can record a suite of kinematic and environmental data, which are used to elucidate animal ecophysiology and improve conservation efforts. Machine learning techniques are used for interpreting the large amounts of data recorded by bio-loggers, but there exists no common framework for comparing the different machine learning techniques in this domain. This makes it difficult to, for example, identify patterns in what works well for machine learning-based analysis of bio-logger data.

Tidally driven remelting around 4.35 billion years ago indicates the Moon is old.

The last giant impact on Earth is thought to have formed the Moon. The timing of this event can be determined by dating the different rocks assumed to have crystallized from the lunar magma ocean (LMO). This has led to a wide range of estimates for the age of the Moon between 4.

Two decades of three-dimensional movement data from adult female northern elephant seals.

Northern elephant seals (Mirounga angustirostris) have been integral to the development and progress of biologging technology and movement data analysis, which continue to improve our understanding of this and other species. Adult female elephant seals at Año Nuevo Reserve and other colonies along the west coast of North America were tracked annually from 2004 to 2020, resulting in a total of 653 instrument deployments. This paper outlines the compilation and curation process of these high-resolution diving and location data, now accessible in two Dryad repositories.

QuickVol: A lightweight browser tool for immersive visualizations of volumetric data.

Volumetric layouts of data are becoming increasingly common in a number of fields. Visualizing these data often requires downloading a large suite of dedicated tools with a significant learning curve. This process can be overwhelming for students or new researchers looking to quickly visualize and showcase a volumetric dataset.

Geographically widespread and novel hemotropic mycoplasmas and bartonellae in Mexican free-tailed bats and sympatric North American bat species.

Unlabelled: Bacterial pathogens remain poorly characterized in bats, especially in North America. We describe novel (and in some cases panmictic) hemoplasmas (10.1% positivity) and bartonellae (25.

"Genome Assembly Of The Winter Ant, Prenolepis Imparis".

The winter ant, Prenolepis imparis, is one of the most common, widespread, and conspicuous ant species in North America. P. imparis is well adapted to cold climates, and consequently, is often noted as the only active ant species during colder months.

mutants cause hyperinflammatory responses during chronic infection.

Unlabelled: infects roughly half the world's population, causing gastritis, peptic ulcers, and gastric cancer in a subset. These pathologies occur in response to a chronic inflammatory state, but it is not fully understood how controls this process. We characterized the inflammatory response of mutants that cannot produce the quorum sensing molecule autoinducer 2 (AI-2) by deleting the gene for the AI-2 synthase, .

RT-Sort: An action potential propagation-based algorithm for real time spike detection and sorting with millisecond latencies.

With the use of high-density multi-electrode recording devices, electrophysiological signals resulting from action potentials of individual neurons can now be reliably detected on multiple adjacent recording electrodes. Spike sorting assigns these signals to putative neural sources. However, until now, spike sorting can only be performed after completion of the recording, preventing true real time usage of spike sorting algorithms.

Gene expression signatures between Limia perugiae (Poeciliidae) populations from freshwater and hypersaline habitats, with comparisons to other teleosts.

Salinity gradients act as strong environmental barriers that limit the distribution of aquatic organisms. Changes in gene expression associated with transitions between freshwater and saltwater environments can provide insights into organismal responses to variation in salinity. We used RNA-sequencing (RNA-seq) to investigate genome-wide variation in gene expression between a hypersaline population and a freshwater population of the livebearing fish species Limia perugiae (Poeciliidae).

Endangered Pinto/Northern Abalone () are Panmictic Across Their 3700 km Range Along the Pacific Coast of North America.

Connectivity is integral to the dynamics of metapopulations through dispersal and gene flow, and understanding these processes is essential for guiding conservation efforts. Abalone, broadcast-spawning marine snails associated with shallow rocky habitats, have experienced widespread declines, and all seven North American species are threatened. We investigated the connectivity and population genomics of pinto/northern abalone (), the widest-ranging of abalone species.

Perturbations in a pelagic food web during the NE pacific large marine heatwave and persistent harmful diatom blooms.

Unprecedented warm ocean conditions, driven by the Large Marine Heatwave (LMH) and the 2015-16 El Niño in the Northeast Pacific favored pervasive toxigenic Pseudo-nitzschia spp. blooms that caused widespread ecological impacts, but little is known about the magnitude to which marine food webs were altered. Here, we assessed the trophic transfer of domoic acid (DA; a neurotoxin) and changes in trophic position from multiple key species during the peak of the LMH and El Niño in 2015 in comparison with 2018, a reference non-anomalous warm year.

Strategies to boost antibody selectivity in oncology.

Antibodies in oncology are being equipped with toxic cargoes and effector functions that can kill cells at very low concentrations. A key challenge is that most targets on cancer cells are also present on at least some healthy cells. Shared targets can result in off-tumor binding and compromise the safety and potential of therapeutic candidates.

Seroprevalence, incidence estimates, and environmental risk factors for dengue, chikungunya, and Zika infection amongst children living in informal urban settlements in Indonesia and Fiji.

Background: The burden of -transmitted viruses such as dengue, chikungunya, and Zika are increasing globally, fueled by urbanization and climate change, with some of the highest current rates of transmission in Asia. Local factors in the built environment have the potential to exacerbate or mitigate transmission.

Methods: In 24 informal urban settlements in Makassar, Indonesia and Suva, Fiji, we tested children under 5 years old for evidence of prior infection with dengue, chikungunya, and Zika viruses by IgG serology.

Pathological microcircuits initiate epileptiform events in patient hippocampal slices.

How seizures begin at the level of microscopic neural circuits remains unknown. High-density CMOS microelectrode arrays provide a new avenue for investigating neuronal network activity, with unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution. We use high-density CMOS-based microelectrode arrays to probe the network activity of human hippocampal brain slices from six patients with mesial temporal lobe epilepsy in the presence of hyperactivity promoting media.

INTERSPECIES ORGANOIDS REVEAL HUMAN-SPECIFIC MOLECULAR FEATURES OF DOPAMINERGIC NEURON DEVELOPMENT AND VULNERABILITY.

The disproportionate expansion of telencephalic structures during human evolution involved tradeoffs that imposed greater connectivity and metabolic demands on midbrain dopaminergic neurons. Despite the central role of dopaminergic neurons in human-enriched disorders, molecular specializations associated with human-specific features and vulnerabilities of the dopaminergic system remain unexplored. Here, we establish a phylogeny-in-a-dish approach to examine gene regulatory evolution by differentiating pools of human, chimpanzee, orangutan, and macaque pluripotent stem cells into ventral midbrain organoids capable of forming long-range projections, spontaneous activity, and dopamine release.

Multiscale Cloud-Based Pipeline for Neuronal Electrophysiology Analysis and Visualization.

Electrophysiology offers a high-resolution method for real-time measurement of neural activity. Longitudinal recordings from high-density microelectrode arrays (HD-MEAs) can be of considerable size for local storage and of substantial complexity for extracting neural features and network dynamics. Analysis is often demanding due to the need for multiple software tools with different runtime dependencies.

Phospholipid Scramblase 1 (PLSCR1) Regulates Interferon-Lambda Receptor 1 (IFN-λR1) and IFN-λ Signaling in Influenza A Virus (IAV) Infection.

Phospholipid scramblase 1 (PLSCR1) is an antiviral interferon-stimulated gene (ISG) that has several known anti-influenza functions such as interfering with viral nuclear import, regulating toll-like receptor (TLR) 9 and potentiating the expression of other ISGs. However, the exact mechanisms of anti-flu activity of PLSCR1 in relation to its expression compartment and enzymatic activity, and the molecular and cellular mechanisms involved have not been completely explored. Moreover, only limited animal models have been studied to delineate its role at the tissue level in influenza infections.

Opportunities to design better computer vison-assisted food diaries to support individuals and experts in dietary assessment: An observation and interview study with nutrition experts.

Automatic visual recognition for photo-based food diaries is increasingly prevalent. However, existing tools in food recognition often focus on food classification and calorie counting, which may not be sufficient to support the variety of food and healthy eating goals people have. To understand how to better design computer-vision-based food diaries to support healthy eating, we began to examine how nutrition experts, such as dietitians, use the visual features of food photos to evaluate diet quality.

Synthesis and structural characterization of the heavy tricysteinylpnictines, models of protein-bound As(III), Sb(III), and Bi(III).

The heavier group 15 elements As, Sb, and Bi are more restricted in their biochemistry than the nearly ubiquitous lighter congeners N and P, but organisms do encounter compounds of these elements as environmental toxins, starting materials for secondary metabolite biosynthesis, substrates for primary metabolism, or exogenously applied medicines. Under many physiological conditions, these compounds are transformed into pnictogen(III) species, the soft Lewis acidic character of which leads them to interact strongly with biologically relevant soft Lewis bases such as small-molecule thiols or cysteine residues of proteins and peptides. The archetypal complexes As(Cys), Sb(Cys), and Bi(Cys) have been studied in the past but a lack of detailed information about their molecular structures has hampered the analysis of protein structures featuring As(III), Sb(III), and Bi(III) bound to cysteine thiolate residues.

A defining member of the new cysteine-cradle family is an aECM protein signalling skin damage in .

Apical extracellular matrices (aECMs) act as crucial barriers, and communicate with the epidermis to trigger protective responses following injury or infection. In , the skin aECM, the cuticle, is produced by the epidermis and is decorated with periodic circumferential furrows. We previously showed that mutants lacking cuticle furrows exhibit persistent immune activation (PIA).